Had college students rate faces (varied on four features) for youthfulness, then had children of increasing ages rate them for cuteness, helplessness, and youthfulness. Found that children, like college students, evaluated youthfulness based on immature features, although older children were more consistent and were more sensitive to eye position…

Children and adults were trained and tested on formation of novel simple discriminations and conditional stimulus relations. Subjects who formed these sets were trained and tested on formation of stimulus equivalence classes. A modest majority of children matched directly paired stimuli; a few matched indirectly paired stimuli. All normal adults…

Examined whether experience correctly producing consonants plays role in developing underlying representation which mediates perception of visible speech. Tested preschoolers (divided by their making of substitution errors) and adults in auditory-only, visual-only, and audiovisual conditions. Found children overall showed less visual influence and…

Examined engagement of children's cognitive capacity by televised material using secondary task paradigm. Had children respond to auditory probes distributed across researcher-manipulated segments of program. Found capacity more effectively engaged when language was comprehensible, if children were looking at TV when probes were presented; for…

Employed a modified dual task approach with 7- to 9-year olds to determine whether one of the classic M-power measures, the digit placement task, is indeed capacity-limited. Found that several critical assumptions concerning the use of the dual-task procedure were met; further testing revealed that the digit placement task is indeed…

When taught to link sorting to self-instruction ("I'm looking for blue triangles") children show perfect accuracy in sorting. This study investigated if this performance would generalize to new stimuli. One participant showed near-perfect generalization to all new stimulus sets (shapes, letters, pictures); two had difficulty with letters.…

Attempted to clarify whether fear is related to distorted cognitive processing of fear-related information. Administered card and single-trial formats of Stroop task to spider-fearing and control children. Found bias for spider words in both, regardless of format; further, processing biases assessed by the formats did not correlate, suggesting…

Had children draw two blocks arranged in depth, and then moved either child or array and had children draw what was then a left-right arrangement; the transformation was then reversed for a final drawing. Found that when children moved to a new standpoint, there was a significant increase in vertical portrayal (as depth portrayal) between first…

To examine developmental differences in practical problem solving, late adolescents and young adults were presented measures of everyday problem solving that were either self-relevant or self-neutral. Results indicated young adults were more goal-defensive than adolescents; for adolescents, reasoning competence was more strongly related to ratings…

Administered phonological awareness and phoneme identification tasks to dyslexic children and chronological age (CA) and reading-level (RL) comparison groups. Found no real differences in categorical perception between dyslexic and RL groups; however, more dyslexics (7 of 25) had abnormal identification functions. Results suggest that some…

Reports on connectionist models that simulated the formation of global-level and basic-level representations in young infants; revealed a global-to-basic order of category emergence; uncovered formation of two global-level representations--initial "self-organizing" perceptual level and subsequent "trained," non-perceptual level; and displayed…

Investigated intra-individual development of ability to modify the size of a human figure drawing. Found through longitudinal data that children between ages 7 and 9 were able to reduce drawing size. Discovered that the larger the figure initially, the more complex the level of spatial axes system, and the more persons in the picture, the greater…

Describes psychological approaches to study of cognition and emotion, identifies issues that may provide direction to understanding the organization and integration of cognition and emotion in development. Maintains that an integrative model for the study of "cogmotion" is needed, suggesting that cogmotion research will contribute to the exchange…

Examined relations between children's temperament, ability overestimation, and accidental injuries. Found that watching peer failure on physical tasks was related to conservative ability judgments for same task. Surgency/Undercontrol was related to 6-year-olds' judgment accuracy and to 8-year-olds' decision times. Ability overestimation was…

Compared visual self-recognition in toddlers of depressed (DM) and nondepressed mothers (NDM). Found that DM toddlers showing self-recognition were more likely than NDM toddlers to display nonpositive affect. DM toddlers not showing self-recognition and who shifted affect in the postrouge condition were less securely attached to mothers with less…